I keep coming back to "all this for literally Donald Trump," but it fits. There's not some more competent aspiring autocrat who'd somehow "earn" or "win" this. This is how it has always gone: feckless/evil elites attaching themselves to the sociopath they believe will get them where they want to go.
Someone much smarter than me made the point that it had to be a guy from Queens. A white, mediocre son of privilege from the borough where white flight originated was the perfect villain to exploit the fraying edges of society in our era.
